In these dark economic times, if you have lost your job it may be worthwhile to think counter-intuitively.

Make your own work. Paul Graham makes a great case for it.

“Our bodies weren’t designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically.”

“The root of the problem is that humans weren’t meant to work in such large groups. … Though they’re statistically abnormal, startup founders seem to be working in a way that’s more natural for humans.”

As an inveterate freelance worker most of my life, I totally agree with Graham’s analysis. In between I’ve worked for a mega-corp, BT (British Telecom), and for Government, the UK’s Central Office of Information. In each case I was a whale out of water.

It’s only when I started businesses around my personal template, or became a freelance writer breathing the air of freedom, that I came fully into my own. Most people are probably like this.

Paul Graham — who is a venture capitalist — is right. You can buck the system, and you owe it to yourself to make the attempt.

Incidentally, a recession is a great time to go it alone. Venture capitalists have money burning a hole in their vaults, there’s a surfeit of experts going cheap, and opportunities for anyone with a great idea or a new approach.

Innovation is at a premium during a downturn. Many of the biggest names in corporate America began in a garage during a recession when there was little else to do.

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Databases have always been clunky bits of software. Often, they don’t find what you are looking for. At other times they produce the wrong result.

They are also leaky and easy to hack. Perhaps their worst feature, though, is that they are expensive to purchase and even more so to develop to a business’s needs.

Hope is at hand, however. It seems databases on hard drives are on the way out, to be replaced by “cloud computing.”

Read John Evans’s article, The Great Database Crisis 2008, over at Syntagma. Here’s an excerpt:

So how is it that a Google search produces millions of results in a fraction of a second? We know they have all of the internet on millions of computers in various datacentres around the world. Could it possibly be done with a massive distributed database threaded over countless Dell boxes?

The answer, obviously, is no. But the surprising fact is that they hold the entire internet in RAM memory. That’s what makes the process so lightning fast.